Done With The Compass
by wallflower1
Summary: Wild nights. Giles/Olivia alternate cannon.


**Title:** Done With The Compass  
**Characters/Pairing**: Giles/Olivia,  
**Rating:** R for language and suggestions of violence and sexual conduct.  
**Spoilers:**Minor ones for season 4 of Buffy and season 2 of Angel  
**Summery: **_Wild nights. _  
**A/N:** Title and summery taken from the Dicken's poem "Wild Nights". Season 4 AU.

* * *

"Hello Olivia," he said, expecting her to scream, to drop her groceries in alarm. But instead she paused, key dangling in the lock of her flat's front door, her pulse mouse quick.

"Rupert, fancy seeing you here, not dead."

"Undead actually. I'm a vampire."

"Oh? Your mate Ethan didn't go into details, just said you were still up and about. Come to kill me then?" With a twist of her wrist, she was over the threshold of her home and beyond his reach. He wasn't worried.

"I've been considering it. Thought about how your heart would taste. Thought about skinning you alive and arranging your organs in abstract structures. Mostly, I've though about you as a vampire."

"I don't think it would work out. I'm a vegetarian." She set her bags down in the hallway before leaning against the door jam.

"Very funny. Are you going to invite me in?"

"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you."

"Never considered eternal youth? Shirking all your responsibilities and societal constraints?" Ripper caressed the invitation barrier, watched it ripple under his hand.

"At one time, yes. But I don't really fancy living in the dark and biting people every night."

"For the record, it's one person every two to three nights." He smiled at her, showing all of his flat even teeth.

"Good to see you're still good for a lecture on all things obscure and demonic."

"If I remember correctly, you use to love my lecture voice."

"Yes," Olivia said. "About Sumerian artifacts and The Stones. Not so much about vampire biology."

It came to him them. "You are afraid, of the darkness."

"No,I'm afraid of not being human."

"I'm still me, Olivia, still Ripper."

"I think you're more Ripper then ever before. And that in itself warrants a little fear."

He sniffed the air with a smile. "And perhaps a little excitement, too?"

She didn't deny it, merely arching her eyebrow in the way she did when she had nothing to say. It was true, he didn't particularly want to kill her, but as they were here in London, (regrouping Spike said, but clearly hiding from Angel's wrath). He wanted to look her up.

Now that his punishment for killing the human Darla was over, now that he was cut down from the cellar ceiling and his fangs had grown back, he wanted something more then just a meal, more then the bloody sex games his sires played. And Olivia looked sweet, dancer legs in thin tight denim and slender form in a snug cream sweater that clung to her tits like a second skin.

"It suddenly occurs to me, why you're here," Olivia said.

"Does it? Please, enlighten me."

"Compare and contrast. We've slept together when you were alive, and now you're curious what it's like now that you're dead."

"Undead," he corrected. If he wanted to eat a beautiful woman, he could leave and have some pretty thing under his cock and fangs within the hour. But he was a little curious about what it would be like for someone who knew him. Someone who could tell him if they preferred human Rupert to demon Ripper. What happened with Ethan involved so much dark magic and demon presence that it hardly counted.

"But if you don't mind, I'd rather not invite you in my home."

Perhaps this was for the best. His last few meals ended up dead before he could stop himself. He prodded that demon part of him, and he didn't want to kill here ether.

"Could get a hotel." It wasn't hard to deduce that taking her back to the nest, where Dru had a few children in a wooden crate in the parlor and Spike had been hosting nightly kitten poker games with a plethora of demons, would utterly kill the mood.

"I'm taking my sliver crucifix."

"Sliver does nothing, but the cross will work. I would offer you holy water, but I'm no longer in the habit of carrying it."

Olivia disappeared into her flat. Emerging ten minutes later smelling of toothpaste and perfume, he held out his hand.

"Shall we?"

"To wild nights," she said, slipping her warm hand in his.

He kissed the back of her hand where he could almost taste the blood beneath the skin.


End file.
